IXI

There is a new concept in town - so far all the web talk was technical and for a business owner to get ahead there was very few options. All you could do is learn the techo talk yourself or outsource the whole thing to someone you can trust and loose control. Well, no more! With the launch of the Web Academy a business owner will be able to take back control of their web solution and understand the performance and postion where they are at as well as drive it forward without the need for learning the techno talk and understanding coding techniques.
Still not convinced - how about having independent service providers right next to you displayed to all members. Get the services you need from someone next to you and know that the Web Academy has reviewed and rated their services. Every authorised supplier has also been reviewd and rated by the members and if there are any issues the Web Academy actively gets involved in the resoolution of it from the business owner side.

Web design, development as well as SEO and SEM are only some areas that the Web Academy delivers the information on - let us know what you think and what you would like to see done for your business.

What waits for us in the new year online? Are we to experince new trends and approaches to the things we do now? How fast will we have to adopt and change in order to stay infront?
Looking at 2009 in search trends the internet will continue dominating the scene for most of the businesses with increased competition and tougher descision and at the same time slimmer pickings.
We wil be judged not only on normal metrics but on business performance. The next year will be ROI based internet explosion where the businesses will focus more on education and understaning of their marketing spend. The tough economic times have shown us the value of understanding and test and measure approach and this is why most of the businesses will be looking to see how far they can stretch their marketing $.
It is certain that the return from web will continue to outperform all other mediums in 2010 but the profitability of the major campaigns will be lower compared to last year due to increased competition and enhanced reporting requirements.
Get your thinking hats on and start pushing forward starting from yesterday.

Happy new 2010 year.

Twitter has been paid by Google and Microsoft for the privelege of crawling its site. That is a first incidense of such transaction ever recorded. Does this mean that if your content is great and is of interest to the search hungry visitors that you can charge a search engine for it??? Perhaps we are entering a new stage of web evolution where knowledge holders will ask for $ every time you want to find something. If it costs for the search engine to have access to this information (which is free on the actual site) than they need to pass this cost somewhere and the bacis consumer always ends up paying for it. This particular case is very interesting on many levels:
1. Does this mean that tweeter (paid search inclusion) will be classified as premium content and will bypass all the normal hurdles like page rank and backlinks to be rated highly in the search results?
2. Will the websites be able to have the content blocked on their site from “free crawling” and be entered into the search as “premium partners”?
3. What happens to free information online?
4. Will there be exclusive areas where a search engine specializes - social sites, medical, consumer - depending on which content they are purchasing?

There will be a lot of discussions on what this deal means to the whole industry and how it will affect the Search Engine Optimization for the little company. We all will have to keep a close eye on what comes out of this transaction.

Wizards of Oz tour luncheon at Sydney Hilton hotel was a great success. Packed full of useful information on how and what in the world of business and coupled with a great cause - raising funds for Kidney Health Australia this event was heard far and wide. Tons of positive comments from participants is a sure invitation that the information was not just useful but practical and relevant.
“Great motivation to get off the chair and do something positive for the business!”
“What a delivery!!! Give me more anytime!!!”
and a lot more
look out for Wizards of OZ tour near you.

I have come accross Global Rags recently and being a consumer myself must say that a collection of everything under one roof with great prices is pretty impressive. There are a lot of chains out there and they all have their selling points. My 5 cents is that Global Rags can really be a one stop shop. Check it out - it is well worth the look. A Global rags store got to be somewhere near you. www.globalrags.com

 

 

Directory Submission case study

 

Chapter 1 – Submission

 

There has been a lot of talk as to what is the best and the most effective promotional service for a website. We are here to experiment and report every bit of the information on what is happening and what effects are felt by a simple “free directory registrations” approach.

 

There are a couple of tasks that need to be completed before the submission process:

 

1.                  Write an effective title. Start with the primary keyword and finish with the company name. “Web design and development by WSI”

2.                  Write an effective description. Start with the primary keyword and expand the service definitions. “Web design and development by WSI. Internet Consulting and optimization services. Our Internet Consultants can provide you with an affordable solution to meet your small or medium size business needs.”

3.                  Keywords, Keywords, Keywords. “Internet Consulting, consultant, web design, web development, internet, website, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, SEO, SEM, webpage design, database design, webmaster tools, information”

 

On top of the actual analysis you must come up with a good directory list. It is not good to have paid, reciprocal or “no follow” submissions as they will not produce good affordable results. We are submitting into 100 directories that we have found to have good Google page rank and there are no “no follow” tags on most of the directories we are using.

 

It is important to understand that these directories are human edited and sometimes it takes a lot of time for the approval process to complete. Be patient and keep checking the results.

 

We have picked up http://www.wsiadvantagenet.com.au as the case study and have submitted the site to 100 directories for inclusion.

 

The site currently is Google page rank 1 and the following information has been obtained about the links to the site:

 

Google results:

 

CLIENT SHOWCASE : CASE STUDIES

Online Survey Systems

WSI Video Email - WSI Internet Consultants simplify the Internet …

Search Engine Optimization

The S&S Solution

About Us

 

 

As we can see there is not much going on here, the intention of this exercise is to find out the benefits that the site will receive by being listed in 100 good rated directories

Yahoo search engine marketing is back on the map. It has been lacking a lot of services and loosing heavily to Google on a lot of fronts in terms of performance, flexibility, usability and content. Most of the professional SEM firms have dumped Yahoo for all of the above reasons and now is the time to look at it again. Below is the comparison table from Yahoo Search Engine Marketing release outlining the new functionality in the Ad centre:

 

¹ Assumes no sensitive content is contained in the submitted ad campaign.
² Please note that geo-targeting accuracy is not guaranteed and may vary depending on the level of targeting selected, as well as other factors.
 

We are back on track with all of the items that Google has in their package and more. Depending on the industry it is a lot more effective to advertise in specific search engines more than in others. This depends on a lot of factors and mostly the experience helps to identify the best way forward. It is great the Yahoo has introduced these new features now as it has become increasingly difficult to convince clients to allocate a part of their advertising budget to Yahoo Search Marketing.

Latest spamming technique involves using the standard forms on the site to send unsolicited messages to the owners of the site. Instead of sending spam email – illegal practice – spammers now are beginning to fill in the forms with inappropriate content and submitting it to the site owners.
Web Design has now a dilemma to work with:
1. Make sure that the forms cannot be auto filled in by adding the visual verification code to them
2. Deter prospects and customers by adding visual verification code to forms.

No one was ready to this new angle in spam distribution. Since it is not affecting large populations it is unlikely to be banned and with billions of websites it is likely to spread fast and wide. These distributions rely on ability of the form to be populated by a computer program and automatically submitted. The only sure way of combating this behavior from the design point of view is to block the submission of the form with a visual confirmation. The form still can be populated by software, but the verification ode must be entered by a person. This will not stop the spammers but will severely limit their ability to have a wide distribution.

Please comment on this issue and add your opinion on how it will impact yourself and your customers while submitting standard contact us forms.

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You will find here information on just about everything that is related to the internet sites and technologies.
Please do not forget to come here often to see what we have to say about new developments on the internet.
Best Regards,
Val Saidor
Managing Director
IXI Pty Ltd
www.ixi.com.au